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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Day: March 27, 2003

  • UnHuman. It doesn’t suck too badly.

    After days of waiting, I finally got an opinion back in trade on my latest video, UnHuman. Fellow AMV creator Zarxrax writes,

    This video gets off to a good start, some good editing there. You have some pretty good action sync throughout the video.

    Well, we’re off to a good start there, aren’t we?

    But wait, there’s more.

    When you start cutting back and forth between shots of buildings and stuff at 0:35, the video starts to go downhill. The actual editing here is fine, but the content gets old too fast. Who wants to look at 30 seconds of cutting back and forth betweeen a few buildings? It would have been ok to do this for a few seconds, but I think you just hung onto it for too long. At the least, I believe you could have thrown in at least a couple more different shots of different areas to liven it up a bit more.

    It’s an artistic-taste thing, I suppose, but he’s probably right. That bit does go on a bit longer than perhaps it should. In my defense I point out that the music sort of dictates the length of that particular sequence.

    Throughout the rest of the video, you seem to hang onto specific parts of the movie for too long. What I mean is, large chunks of the video seem to just be showing a section of the story from various points in the movie. If you were trying to tell a story with the video, this could be ok, but I don’t believe that was what you were doing. Mixing up scenes from all around the movie could have kept things a little more lively and interesting.

    This is absolutely true, and is my greatest weakness as a creator right now. I get too tied to the original sequences. I need to break free of that curse in my next video. Absolutely.

    This is a solid video with some good editing, but it just doesn’t seem to go anywhere. I’d recommend that you try to plan out exactly what you want to do with a video before you start making it (i need to follow my own advice here :p).

    Here we touch on the bane of all AMV creators who aspire to greatness: Planning. Which is to say, planning out more than just the opening bit and one or two “cool bits” is the core of almost all really great videos. The next video must be planned.

    Yeah, right. I’m the guy who’s never finished a story or essay outline in his life. But dammit, I must do better next time.

    And this, folks, is why I really wanted peer feedback. It’s one thing to “think” you know what’s wrong with your work, it’s something else to have someone point it out to you in detail. This is a good thing when you’re still learning your craft.

  • When Good Servers Go Bad

    Let me tell you how the sequence of events went down. (“Down” being the operative, or inoperative, word.)

    1) Something Happens at about 5:30 this morning. (All times Pacific, thank you.) Perhaps one Audicy session too many was opened, perhaps it was just that the server had had enough. Either way, the Audicy server and (probably) the two workstations began flooding the network with traffic. Also, the Audicy server’s root partition is chock-full, which is likely the cause of the commotion (as the clients madly try to read and write data on the server).

    2) A bit after 6:00, my phone beeps to let me know that we can no longer communicate with Entercom Corporate over the WAN. This happens fairly often, and usually clears itself up, so I fail to panic and instead go back to bed.

    3) A bit after 7:00, my phone rings. It’s John Graefe, my boss at Corporate, asking why our WAN router is incommunicado. Whoopsie. I tell him I’ll jet right down to the office and Deal With It.

    4) By 8:00, I’ve burped the WAN router to no avail.

    5) At about 8:30, I notice that the main office network switch is saturated. Instead of happily blinking busy little activity lights, the whole display is lit solid. This worries me. I ponder burping the switch, but that would kick everybody in the building off the network, causing all kinds of chaos. Instead I start pulling plugs, briefly, one by one until the lights go dark(er).

    6) I discover that unplugging the cable that connects to the Audicy server makes Everything All Better. Upon investigation of the server, I see that the root partition is full. Unloading the Netware emulation code frees up space. I decide to reboot the machine. This is great, but Linux insists on checking all the partitions since the machine hasn’t been rebooted in ages.

    7) While the 60-plus gigabyte partition is being slowly fsck’d (and that’s a technical term, thank you), I look in horror at the central switch, which has again lit up solid.

    8) After unplugging a series of cables around the server room, kicking half the building off the network in the process, I discover that a machine in Production Room 3 is the culprit. Hmm, what’s in there? Oh yes. An Audicy workstation. The workstation in question is powered down, which makes Everything All Better Yet Again.

    9) I check the Audicy server, all seems well. For grins and chuckles (since both workstations are turned off) I upgrade the kernel from 2.4.0-test10 to 2.4.20, mostly in the vain hope that the memory/space leak will go away.

    10) The Audicy server is rebooted on the new kernel, and the Production Room 1 workstation is brought back online and tested for network connectivity. All is well. The Production Room 3 workstation, already due to be removed since there’s now a ProTools workstation in place, is completely disconnected pending physical removal from the room.

    There’s my morning in a nutshell… an appropriate receptacle. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to attempt to rehabilitate the general-purpose computer in Production Room 5, which seems to have suffered a catastrophic failure for unknown reasons…

  • Wendilynn On Display

    Last weekend, Wendi took part in a sort of promotional fashion show at the nearby Fashion Bug store.

    I keep telling her she has incredible poise and beauty. I invite you to check out the proof for yourselves. And then visit her page so you can tell her how great she looks.

    (And no, I’m not doing this because I’m trying to butter her up. Sheesh. How shallow do you think I am, eh?)

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